African Philosophy

5/13/2018 African Philosophy

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12 PART ONE: METAPHYSICS

Suppose I argue that people who repeatedly break the law should receideath penalty and then catch you cheating on your taxes three years ina rodemand capital punishment. On what grounds will you argue that your lifebe spared? Is life merely a verbal fencing match in which the person with theskill wins? Or, are there standards by which we ought to decide what to do?The Sophists argued the former position and Plato supported the latter.hands of the Sophists, philosophy was vulnerable to becoming one cheapamong many others. Like any valuable tool, philosophy can be misused. So,

left with two cautions. From this selection, we are warned against being tricslick but shallow logic. From the Cave Allegory, we are warned against beingin our ignorance. There is a middle ground between being too easily swaythose who would dazzle us with words and being too closed to new ideasomeone who has climbed outside the cave and into the sunshine. Philosophhelp us find that middle ground.

1 . 3 Is There an African Philosophy?INNOCENT ONYEWUENYI

Preparing to ReadIt is tempting to take the norms of our own culture as norms for all of existencpecially for those of us who live in the Western world-the so-called first wthere is a strong temptation to assume that our economic and military promiguarantee the superiority of our ideas and our worldview. Ithas been easy fodismiss the cultures and thought systems of Asia and Africa as "primitive" andsume that our philosophy would be as welcome as our technology in theseward" regions of the world.We have been shocked when writers, even from the so-called third world

dared to criticize the West and to suggest the superiority of their own ways ofand being. Suppose I define higher order thinking as the ability to demonstratrasensory perception and declare that since you lack this ability you clearly hpossibility of becoming a philosopher? You would have several options open tYou could accept my judgment and your implied deficiency, or you could qumy definition and attempt to broaden it.This is precisely what Professor Onyewuenyi does in the next reading.Western philosophy a disease that "divorced thought from life," he creates a b

definition for philosophy and demonstrates how the African version of it opera


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Innocent Onyewuenyi: Is There an African Philosophy?IN CONVERSATION WITH professors andstudents in America who knew I was teachingAfrican philosophy, the question always put tome was: Are there African philosophers andwhat have they written? I have not heard orread of any. In other words, if there are noknown academic philosophers in Africa, thenthere is no African philosophy.Remember that I am in no way conceding

that there are no academic philosophers inAfrica. There are several of them, but their ac-counts were purposely withheld from history ofphilosophy books. . . . When they are men-tioned they are grouped with Greco-Orientalphilosophers. Little do some of us know thatPlotinus, who wrote works on philosophy andopened a school in Rome, was from Lycan inEgypt. He made an attempt to travel to Persiaand India to study their philosophies, but theexpedition failed. Little do some of us knowthat the first woman philosopher, Hypatia, wasfrom Alexandria and was murdered by Chris-tians. Names like St. Augustine, Origen, Cyril,and Tertulian are not unfamiliar; they are blackAfricans. More pertinent to our subject is thefact that what today we call Greek or Westernphilosophy is copied from indigenous Africanphilosophy of the "Mystery System;" All the val-ues of the mystery system were adopted by theGreeks and Ionians who came to .Egypt tostudy; . or studied elsewhere under Egyptian-trained teachers. These included Herodotus,Socrates, Hypocrates, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristo-tle, and others. Are we not taught that Socratesis the first man to say "Man know thyself?" Yet,this expression was found commonly inscribedon Egyptian temple doors centuries beforeSocrates was born. Aristotle not only receivedhis education in Africa, but he took over an en-tire library of works belonging to the Egyptianmystery system when he entered Egypt withAlexander the Great, after which we hear of theCorpus Aristotelium. Plato's alleged Theory of

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Ideas is borrowed from Egypt. Parmenides's ref-erences to "charioteers" and "winged steeds"were already dramatized in the JudgementScene of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.One would have to read The Stolen Legacy

by George G. M. James to get some idea of theapprenticeship of the so-called Greek philoso-phers under Egyptian Mystery Priests. From hisreading of Herodotus, Pliny, Diogenes Laertius,and early historians of philosophy, James notedabout Pythagoras: "We are also further in-formed through Herodotus and Pliny, that aftersevere trials, including circumcision, had beenimposed upon him by Egyptian priests, he wasfinally initiated into all their secrets. That helearnt the doctrine of metempsychosis, ofwhich there was no trace before in the Greekreligion; that his knowledge of medicine andstrict system of diethetics rules, distinguished.him as a product of Egypt . . . and that his at-tainment in geometry corresponded with theascertained fact that Egypt was the birth placeof that science.'?A contemporary African author, Willie E.

Abraham, in his Mind of A/rica, gives an ac-count of a Ghanaian philosopher by the nameAmo Anton, born near Axim about the year1700. He went to Holland, entered the Univer-sity of Thalle and in 1729 publicly defended hisdissertation. He moved an to Wittenberg, andwhile Kant was still a boy, became Master ofPhilosophy there. In 1734 he defended a workin which he argued that sensation was not amental faculty. (Amo was a rationalist philoso-pher after Leibniz, whom as a boy he met at theDuke of Brunswick's.) His performance wasgreatly praised. And the chairman and facultymembers described him as a most noble andrenowned man from Africa, extraordinarilyhonest, diligent, and so erudite that he stoodabove his mates. In 1738 he produced his mag-num opus, a book on logic, theory of knowl-edge and metaphysics.i

From African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, Wright. Courtesy of Paragon House.


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14 PART ONE: METAPHYSICSThere were philosophers in the university

towns of Timbucktu and Jene in West Africawho wrote works on the subject. Basil David-son quotes the historian Leo Africanus, whowrote around 1520 concerning African scholarsin the Mali and Songhai empires, "By the six-teenth century, West African writers were atwork on historical, legal, moral and religioussubjects.'? Alexis Kagame has written on theconcept of being among the Ruanda-Urundis.Adesany Adebayo has written on Yoruba meta-physical thinking. Placide Tempels sketched theworldview and ethics of the Congo. Joseph B.Danquah in Ghana did extensive work on theconcept of God among the Akans.Philosophizing:A Universal ExperienceBe that as it may, my contention is that the phi-ldsophy of a people has little or nothing to dowith the academic exponents of that philoso-phy. Philosophizing is a universal experience.Every culture has its own worldview. If youstudy the history of philosophy, you will findthere is no agreement on the definition of phi-losophy. Some say it is the love of wisdom,others, the search for truth, and still others, thesense of wonder. What is generally agreedabout philosophy is that it seeks to establishorder among the various phenomena of the sur-rounding world, and it traces their unity by re-ducing them to their simplest elements. Whatare these various phenomena? They are things,facts, events, an intelligible world, an ethicalworld, and a metaphysical world.These various phenomena of the surround-

" ing world are the same in all cultures and soci-eties. The themes dealt with in philosophy areuniversal. How each culture traces the unity ofthese themes, synthesizes, or organizes theminto a totality is based on each culture's conceptof life, namely the interrelationship between ob-jects and persons and between persons and per-sons themselves. Hence it is that the order or

unity the people of a culture establish is.own order relative to their own conception,life in which everything around them becomeaningful. No culture has the order or theword. Hence the establishment of various trof a spontaneous, logical, ethical, aesthetand metaphysical nature, not one of them bof absolute or universal validity.This is the basis for calling a philosophyropean, Asian, Indian, or American. Ifwhathave said is true, we can and should talAfrican philosophy, because the African cuhas its own way of establishing order. It haown view of life. And "life" accordingDilthey, is the starting point of philosopGeorg Misch, summarizes him thus: "Diltheygarded 'life' as the starting-point of philosoplife as actually lived and embodied or 'objfied' in the spiritual world we live in. Lifecording to Dilthey, is a subject for scieninvestigation insofar as history and morallosophy or the human sciences deal with itour knowledge of life is, above all, containecertain cultural or personal views ofworld-which plays a prominent part in phophy as well as in religion and poetry.:"Hegel-underscored the cultural and relaaspect of philosophy when he said: "But men

not at certain epochs merely philosophizegeneral. For there is a definite philosophy warises among a people and the definite charawhich permeates all the other historical sidethe Spirit of the people, which is most intimarelated to them, and which constitutesfoundation. The particular form of a philosois thus contemporaneous with a' particularstitution of the people amongst whom it mits appearance, with their institutions and foof government, their morality, their socialand their capabilities, customs and enjoymof the same.'? The notion of philosophy itseHegel, as can be deduced' from his words,factor in the life history of the human experieof the individual mind and is subject to theditions of race, culture, and civilization. A fur


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Innocent Onyewuenyi: Is There an African Philosophy?support to the issue of philosophical relativitywas given by Victor Uchendu in his monographTheIgbo of Southeast Nigeria. He said, "To knowhow a people view the world around them is tounderstand how they evaluate life, and apeople's evaluation of life, both temporal andnon-temporal, provides them with a 'charter' ofaction, a guide to Behaviour." 6The African has an unwritten timeless codeof behavior and attitudes which have persistedfor centuries. The condition for the possibility ofthis, its explanation, lies in the presence of acorpus of coordinated mental or intellectualconcepts. Placide Tempels puts it better: "Be-haviour can be neither universal nor permanentunless it is based upon a concatenation of ideas,a logical system of thought, a complete positivephilosophy bf the universe, of man and of thethings which surround him, of existence, life,death and the life beyond."?Having shown that there can be and there

certainly is an African philosophy, I now exposethe content of this philosophy as briefly as pos-sible. We are going to treat the core areas ofphilosophy, any philosophy-namely, meta-physics or ontology, epistemology, and ethics.African Metaphysics orHenry Alpern in his March of P il hy said:"Metaphysics by the very de ill on that it is astudy of reality, of that which does not appearto our senses, of truth in the absolute sense, isthe groundwork of any theory concerning allphases of human behavior. David Hurne, whomno one can charge of shutting his eyes to expe-rience, said that metaphysics is necessary forart, morality, religion, economics, sociology; forthe abstract sciences, as well as for every branchof human endeavour considered from the prac-tical angle. It is the foundation upon which onebuilds one's career consciously and uncon-sciously; it is the guide; the author of the humaninterests; upon its truth or falsity depends whattype of man you may develop into. ,,8

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The ideas from this quotation explain ade-quately the singular and unique importance ofAfrican ontology in the overall treatment and un-derstanding of African .philosophy. In recentdecades, studies that were made of the scientific,religious, and practical human endeavor ofAfricans have accepted their foundation as con-sisting in ancestor worship, animism, totemism,and magic. These are only vague ideas, becauseno well-founded definitions of animism, totem-ism, and magic have been laid down, and theroots of these conceptions have not been ex-plored. The root is in the fundamental concept ofAfrican ontology. When we understand this on-tology, the concepts of magic, ancestor worship,totemism, and sorcery, as ethnologists applythem to Africa, become ridiculous if not foolish.What then is ontology? It is the science of"being as such," "the reality that is." The meta-physics of Western philosophy has generallybeen base . O n a static conce tion of bein ~ nthe [lcan ilosophical thought, being is dy-narru istence-in-relation sums up me Africanconception of life and reality. The African doesnot separate being from force as its attribute.Rather "the Africans speak, act, live, as if forthem beings were forces .... Force, for them, isthe nature of being, force is being, being isforce." When you say, in terms of Western phi-losophy, that beings are differentiated by theiressences or nature; Africans say that forces differin their essences or nature. There is the divineforce, terrestrial or celestial forces, humanforces, and vegetable and even mineral forces."When Western metaphysics defines "being" as"that Which is" or "the thing insofar as it is," theAfrican definition reads: "that which is force," or"an existent force." God of course is the GreatForce. There is a hierarchy of forces startingfrom God, spirits, founding fathers, the dead, ac-cording to the order of primogeniture; then theliving according to their rank in terms of senior-ity. After living men come animals, vegetables,and minerals, which are in turn categorized ontheir relative importance in their own classes.


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1 6 PART ONE: METAPHYSICS

The Interaction Forces: know or have wisdom inasmuch as hOne Being Influences Another proaches divine wisdom. One approachesvine knowledge when one's flesh becomesThe concept of separate beings, of substances, fleshy, to use Leopold Senghor's expresto use a scholastic term, which exist side by that is, the older a person gets, the moreside, independent one of another, is foreign to dom he has. The same note of hierarchyAfrican thought.!? I might add parenthetically into play here. The ancestors have morethat I am not so sure that this concept of sepa- dom, followed by the elders, dead or livinrate substances might not be the ontological Distinction must be made here of thbasis for so much individualism and personal levels of human intelligence. Intelligence cfreedom in the Western world. The African either practical or habitual. Practicalthought holds that created beings preserve a gence is cleverness, slyness in dealing wibond one with another, an intimate ontological contingent aspects of forces. Habitualrelationship. There is interaction of being with gence is active knowledge of the natubeing, that is to say of force with force. This is forces, their relationship. And this includesmore so among rational beings known as man, the being with intelligence, makesMuntu, a term which includes the living and the things and activates the forces asleep indead, Orishas, and God. Muntu is a force en- This kind of wisdom is different fromdowed with intelligence, a force which has con- knowledge, which is not regarded as wisdtrol over irrational creatures known as bintu. the strict traditional sense. "Study and peBecause of this ontological relationship among search for knowledge does not give wibeings, the African knows and feels himself to One can learn to read, to write; but all thbe in intimate and personal relationship with nothing in common with 'wisdom.' It givother forces acting above or below him in the ontological knowledge of the nature of bhierarchy of forces. "The human being, apart There are many talents and clever skills thfrom the ontological hierarchy and interaction main far short of wisdom."13 H.aving a cof forces, has no existence in the conception degree does not qualify an African as aof the Bantu."!' So much for the ontology- person in the community. This in part exsketchy though it may be. . why there has been confusion in Africa

the colonial era, because the colonial adtrators regarded the educated as thepeople, and consequently and arbitrarilpointed them legislators and leaders in themunity, contrary to African political philoswhich took the eldest of the community,by divine law, the repository of wisdom alink between God, the ancestors, and theHe is divine. Swailem Sidhom in his"The Theological Estimate of Man" lamentestate of things when he said: "Power iceived by the African as something pertainithe divine. Hence it cannot be placed intoercised hands. But the hands are rarelycised nowadays. Scheduled educationreplaced experience and has-toppled thcepted standards. Seniority of age doe

African Epistemologyor Theory of KnowledgeTheory of knowledge follows closely upon on-tology. The view adopted by the African theoryof knowledge is consonant with its meta-physics. Knowledge or wisdom for the Africanconsists in how deeply he understands the na-ture of forces and their interaction. "True wis-dom," Tempels tells us, "lies in ontologicalknowledge; it is the intelligence of forces,oftheir hierarchy, their cohesion and their interac-tion. ,,12We said earlier that God is Force; God isalso wisdom in that He knows all forces, theirordering, their dependence, their potential, andtheir mutual interaction. A person is said to


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Innocent Onyewuenyi: Is There an African Philosophy?mean much anymore, and a father may now beinstructed by the child of his bowels. Neverthe-less, power is dangerous and it kills. like a live

lcoal from upon the very altar of God, it canonly be cared for by those who have been grad-uated into maturiry.v-? This despair is under-standable if you grasp the African's conceptionof existence and his philosophy of vital forces.

African Ethical TheorySome foreign observers of the African scenehave declared that the African has no sense ofsin. An example is Edwin Smith, who said in hisAfrican Ideas of God: "It would seem that ingeneral Africans are not conscious of any directrelation between their theism and their ethic ofdynamism.t'> Others maintain that Africans havebut a vague idea of the Supreme Being, that healways keeps his distance and does not associatehimself with the daily lives of men. All these andmore are mere prejudices. The Nigerian writer,E. Adeolu Adegbola, said about African morality:"Everywhere Africanmorality is hinged on manysanctions. But the most fundamental sanction isthe fact that God's all-seeing eyes scan the totalarea of human behaviour and personal relation-ships. God is spoken of as having eyes all overlike a sieve.,,16Placide Tempels, who questionedAfricans closely on this point, informs us that,"the influence of God in the daily life of man isrecognized in many African proverbs and say-ings... . ' > 1 7 He says that such authors, as I men-tioned above, are speaking under the influenceof Western moral theory, according to which thesocial order is mere conformity with convention-alized behavior. On the contrary, African moral-ity and moral law are filled with fixed beliefs,unshakable principles held from conviction.They surely know the distinction between goodand evil. They refer to moral evil as "stinking";they feel it deeply in their spirit.The norms of good and evil are objective

and of universal validity; no room for subjec-tivism or solipsism and situation ethics. Africanethical truths are not relative. Except for cases

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17of ignorance, there are little or no mitigatingcircumstances.The root of their knowledge of good and evilis bound up with their philosophy. The Africanssee a relationship between morality and the on-tological order. Everything is associated and co-ordinated under the all-embracing unity of "vitalforce." In his judgment of his conduct the A f r i C a t ifaKes into consideration the fact that he is notalone; that he is a cog in a wheel of interactingforces. He knows that the most important thingin his action is not how it affects him ersonall,but how it-affects t e wor order, the spiritualr~, OOLsIQef which he aoes not exist as aMuntu, outside of which he is a planet off itsorbit, meaningless and nonexisting. His life is notl.Ut9wn in a selfish manner It.belongs to Go~.The strengthening of this life and its preservationare in the hands of his ancestors and elders. Inthe life of the community each person has hisplace and each has his right to well-being andhappiness. Therefore, what to do and what toavoid in order to preserve, increase, andstrengthen vital force in himself and others of hisclan constitute morality. "Objective morality tothe Bantu is ontological, immanent and intrinsicmorality. Bantu moral standards depend essen-tially on things ontologically understcod.t '"It follows that an act will be accounted ethi-cally good if it can be judged ontologically goodand by deduction be assessed as juridically just.The same idea is introduced by plato in the Re-public. The individual Greek citizen is to interpretan action good or evil, not in reference to selfishinterests, but in reference to the community ofwhich he is a part. The African ethical theory iswhat I would like to call metaphysical ethics inone sense and ethical communalism in anothersense-where an individual takes into considera-tion the community of vital forces in deciding thegoodrtess or evil of his proper actions.Human positive or customary laws are madein reference to the growth or preservation ofMuntu's vital force; otherwise they are mean-ingless. All customary law that is worthy of thename is inspired, animated, and justified from


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18 PART ONE: METAPHYSICSthe African's point of view, by the philosophy ofliving forces, or growth, of influence, and of thevital hierarchy The validity and strength of thecustomary law of indigenous peoples reside inits foundation in their philosophy. This is whywe say in African ethical theory that an actwhich is characterized as ontologically good"will therefore be accounted ethically good; andat length, be assessed as juridically just. ,,19 "Incontrast to the European s . stice, whichmeasures liability by terial dam , it is ac-cording to African phil sop y t e loss in force,. 'inMf life)hat is evaluated, ind~endentIy ofmaterial considerations.v"

. ConclusionThe rediscovery of African philosophy has influ-enced African scholars in writing about Africanpersonality or what the French-speaking Afri-cans call Negritude. Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Ny-erere, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, NnamdiAzikiwe.iand Chinua Achebe have written proseand verse to celebrate this philosophy-a phi-losophy of unity and complete encounter of allthings and beings, which by reason of the dy-namic character of African ontology, has sur-faced on the communal structure of our societybased on the division of labor and rights; inwhich man attains growth and recognition byhow well he fulfills a function for the overallwell-being of the community. We Africans havenot yet yielded to the subtlety (and I pray weshall never) which would allow our traditionallawmakers and judges to design customary laws

Continuing to Think

divorced from our philosophy, from the natof beings, as we understand them, and fromview of the world.

NOTES1.James, The Stolen Legacy (New York,1954), p2. Abraham, TheMind of A/rica (Chicago, 1966

p.129.3. Davidson, A History o/West Africa (New Yor

1966), p. 166.4. Misch, The Dawn of Pbilosopby (London, 19

p.47.5 . Hegel, Lectures on the History cf Pbtlosopby(London, 1968), 1: 53.6. Uchendu, The /gbo 0/Southeast Nigeria (NewYork, 1965), p. 12.7. Ternpels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris: PresenceAjricaine, 1969), p. 19.

8. Alpern, TheMarch of Philosophy (New York1934), p. 99.9. Ternpels, Bantu Philosophy, pp. 51 and 52.10. Ibid., p. 58.11. Ibid., p. 104.12. Ibid., p. 73.13. Ibid., p. 74.14. Sidhorn, "The Theological Estimate ofMan,"

Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs, ed. KwesiDickinson (London, 1969), p. 115.15. Smith, African Ideas of God (London, 1950),

22.16. Dickinson, Biblical Revelation, p. 116.17. Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, p. 117.18. Ibid., p. 121.19. Ibid.20. janheinz Jahn, Muntu: An Outline of the New

African Culture (New York, 1961), p. 117.

Does Onyewuenyi make a convincing case for expanding the definition of philophy? Does restricting the' term "philosophy" to formal, academicp1i11osophy narand distort its meaning? Putting Western labels on the worldviews of non-Westcultures allows us to discuss them using words we understand," but is anythingtorted in the process?


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Rigoberta Mencbu: 1 , Rigoberta Mencbu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala 19

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A larger question, and the real purpose of writing the essay, asks: Is there anAfrican philosophy? It is interesting that the argument uses the traditional, Westerncategories or divisions-metaphysics or ontology, epistemology, and axiology orethics. Going back to the preceding example (from Preparing to Read), if you ex-pand the definition of extrasensory perception to "knowing" when someone youlove is in trouble, being able to "predict" how someone will react in a given hypo-thetical situation, and "sensing" who is on the phone before you pick it up, you maysuccessfully include yourself in my definition. And, at the same time, you maydemonstrate the unfair narrowness of my original definition.This is somewhat the position Professor Onyewuenyi has taken. By demonstrating

the existence ,of an African ontology, epistemology, and ethics, he establishes the ex-istence of an African philosophy. Even if the African version differs from traditional,Western ones (being is dynamic rather than static, knowledge or wisdom involvesuJ-lderstanding the forces of bein&!a,thtr that' book reaming, anj_injustjce means lo~in "joy of life" rather than material dama~e), this is no reason to disqualify it.'T'E:elast category is particularly intriguing. Suppose it was considered as unjust totake away my "joy in life" as it currently is to take away my property? Would anyoneseriously argue that property is more valuable than "joy in life"?And, yet, our lawsfail to take this more devastating stealing into account.

1.4 I,Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in GuatemalaRIGOBERTA MENCHU

Preparing to Read

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ure has its own worldview a way of conceptualizing reality that places thein 'i~J wjtbinflre'-e9sm@8:~- Gree r~!~on~!miI}s!~~:g!

African Philosophy

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